Tag Archives: AI

Artificial Intelligence will be a focus of The ConFab 2018, to be held May 20-23 at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. We’ll hear from a variety of speakers on why A.I. is so important to the semiconductor industry, not only in terms of the new types of chips that will be required, but how A.I. will bring dramatic improvements to the semiconductor manufacturing process.

“The exciting results of AI have been fueled by the exponential growth in data, the widespread availability of increased compute power, and advances in algorithms,” notes Rama Divakaruni of IBM, our keynote speaker. “Continued progress in AI – now in its infancy – will require major innovation across the computing stack, dramatically affecting logic, memory, storage, and communication.”

Rama will explain how the influence of AI is already apparent at the system-level by trends such as heterogeneous processing with GPUs and accelerators, and memories with very high bandwidth connectivity to the processor. The next stages will involve elements which exploit characteristics that benefit AI workloads, such as reduced precision and in-memory computation. Further in time, analog devices that can combine memory and computation, and thus minimize the latency and energy expenditure of data movement, offer the promise of orders of magnitude power-performance improvements for AI workloads.

John Hu, Director of Advanced Technology, Nvidia Corporation will also address AI in a talk titled “The Era of Deep Learning IC Industry Driven by AI, Autonomous Driving and Virtual Reality.” Hu notes that the “big bang” of AI and autonomous driving has driven the IC industry into a new era of rapid growth and innovation. In his talk, Hu will describe how the next 1000 times of improvement requires a new paradigm shift in the collaboration and co-optimizations across the whole industry; from materials, process technologies, design and chip/system platform. In this era that machine(s) can improve themselves by deep learning, hear how the semiconductor industry also needs to have the capability of deep learning for innovation, to stay ahead in the changing competitive landscape.

“Artificial intelligence has brought human beings to a point in history, for our industry and the world in general, that is more revolutionary than a small, evolutionary step,” says Howard Witham, Vice President of Texas Operations at Qorvo, who will speak on the potential of AI in the semiconductor fab. Howard will describe how AI provides predictive maintenance, auto defect and wafer map classification, outlier detection, automated recipe setups based on device requirements and upstream data, and dynamic interpolation and guard-banding.

Please join us for these and other insightful talks, including one from Google’s John Martinis on quantum computing. Visit www.theconfab.com for more information.